Their Paths To Victory

America's Most Wanted: Fence-sitters

November 3, 2008|By Jim Tankersley, Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON -- John McCain's best chance for a history-defying comeback rests in the greatest of electoral unknowns: voter turnout.

To win Tuesday, analysts and polls suggest, the Republican nominee must win nearly all the remaining undecided voters in key swing states including Florida and peel a large chunk of "soft" supporters from Democratic rival Barack Obama. Then he must hope his supporters vote in overwhelming numbers and that more Obama supporters than expected stay home.

With that stage set, McCain and Obama are headed to Florida today in a down-to-the-wire fight to win supporters and get people to the polls.

Both candidates uncorked massive get-out-the-vote operations in more than a dozen battleground states Sunday, millions of telephone calls, mailings and door-knockings in a frenzied, fitting climax to a record-shattering $1 billion campaign. Together, they'll spend about $8 per presidential vote. On the campaign trail, both candidates sought to energize voters, but their moods were markedly different.

McCain and his team were defiant. In Wallingford, outside Philadelphia, the sound system played the theme from Rocky as McCain took the stage in a high-school gymnasium to address a crowd of 2,000.

"Let me give you a little straight talk about the state of the race today," McCain said. "There's just two days left, we're a couple of points behind in Pennsylvania. The pundits have written us off, just like they've done before. My friends, the Mac is back."

McCain also scheduled an evening town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, where he's trailing Obama in polls.

"Two days," Obama told 60,000 supporters in Columbus, Ohio, where he began the day, before a scheduled evening appearance in Cleveland with singer Bruce Springsteen and a night rally in Cincinnati. While Obama implored supporters to vote, saying, "Don't think for a minute that power will concede without a fight," he also said, "This is our time. We've got a righteous wind at our backs."

Pushing momentum

Senior McCain campaign officials said they were picking up momentum and votes in the final days. They cast doubt on the turnout assumptions of several polls that showed them trailing badly nationwide and said they've matched Obama in television-ad spending in the last days of the campaign.

They extolled a campaign ground game they said far exceeded President Bush's vaunted re-election machine four years ago in terms of phone and door-to-door contact with voters.

Analysts predict the largest voter turnout ever, perhaps 130 million, and the biggest percentage of eligible voters casting ballots in a century.

McCain pollster Bill McInturff said polls that show Obama with wide leads appear to greatly overestimate the number of self-described Democrats. Some of those polls show Democrats with a 15-point identification advantage over the GOP; since 1984, McInturff said, the largest Democratic lead in presidential exit polling was five points.

"What we're seeing in Missouri and Pennsylvania and in other states," McInturff said, "is that the Barack Obama number is dropping and John McCain is gradually coming up, and I think he is dropping because of that kind of structural barrier in terms of the historic vote in this country."

Analysts expect historically large numbers Tuesday, a prediction McInturff shares. In 2004, 60 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. Michael McDonald, a George Mason University associate professor who tracks early voting, predicted Friday that this year's number could approach 64 percent, which would be the biggest percentage since 1908.

The question is: Who will those voters be?

Pollsters disagree. The latest poll for CBS News and The New York Times shows Democrats outnumbering Republicans by seven points and Obama leading McCain by 11. The latest Fox News poll shows Democrats with a two-point identification edge and Obama leading by three. Gallup's latest poll using its time-honed "traditional likely voter" model shows Obama up by eight.

Who will turn out?

There's disagreement as well on what sort of turnout to expect from first-time voters, young people and African-Americans. Democrats predict those groups will vote at a higher clip than usual, and break heavily for Obama. McCain's team thinks they will, too, but that voting will also increase among other demographic groups, keeping the general makeup of the electorate roughly unchanged.